The constituency covers the whole of the Stirling council area. Most of the area is rural, which has tended to vote Conservative, but there are some large towns in the East, most notably Stirling itself, which used to vote Labour, but has now moved towards SNP. A similar constituency, also called Stirling, is used by the Scottish Parliament.

The seat's population is predominantly concentrated around the historic City of Stirling and its surrounding areas of Bannockburn, Bridge of Allan and Dunblane situated on the eastern fringes of the seat around the River Forth and its lower tributaries. This area consists of a mixture of Conservative-voting suburbs to the north and west, such as Bridge of Allan and Dunblane and the Stirling suburbs of Cambusbarron, Kings Park and Torbrex, and more deprived SNP-voting areas such as Raploch and south-east Stirling, in addition to Bannockburn, and the villages of Cowie, Fallin and Plean situated to the south-east of the city.

A number of small villages dot the corridors of the A84, A85 and A811 roads, including Callander, widely recognised as the gateway to the Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park, and more widely as the gateway to the Scottish Highlands. This area is predominantly Conservative-voting.

Labour gained Stirling at their 1997 landslide election victory, and subsequently held the seat and its coterminous constituency of Stirling in the Scottish Parliament usually with a majority of over 10% of the vote until the SNP's breakthrough ten years later in 2007. The Westminster constituency of Stirling remained Labour in 2010, however it subsequently fell to Steven Paterson of the Scottish National Party in their landslide victory across Scotland in 2015. More recently, the Conservatives have made gains in the area, coming second in the overlapping constituency of Stirling in the Scottish Parliament, and taking more votes than the SNP at the 2017 Stirling Council election. At the 2017 general election, Stephen Kerr unseated Paterson, becoming the first Conservative MP for Stirling in twenty years.

Stirling voted against Scottish independence in 2014 on an above-average margin of 59.8% "No" 40.2% "Yes". At the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum on 23 June 2016, 67.7% of the electorate in Stirling voted for the United Kingdom to remain a member of the European Union with 32.3% voting for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.